Authors: Joyce Carol Oates
Carthage
A shortened version of chapter two appeared in
Fighting Words,
edited by Roddy Doyle, 2011.
Thanks to former Marine Mariette Kalinowski, Sergeant, USMC (ret.), and to Martin Quinn for reading this manuscript with special care as Hertog Research Fellows at Hunter College, and thanks to Greg Johnson for his continued friendship, sharp eye and ear, and impeccable literary judgment.
“Go at once, this very minute, stand at the cross-roads, bow down, first kiss the earth which you have defiled and then bow down to all the world and say to all men, ‘I am a murderer!’ Then God will send you life again.”
—
SONIA TO RASKOLNIKOV, IN
CRIME AND PUNISHMENT
,
FYODOR DOSTOYEVSKY
I don’t feel young now. I think I am old in my heart.
—
AMERICAN IRAQ WAR VETERAN
, 2005
CONTENTS
Four - Descending and Ascending
Six - The Corporal in the Land of the Dead
Seven - The Corporal’s Confession
Fourteen - The Church of the Good Thief
D
IDN’T LOVE ME ENOUGH.
Why I vanished. Nineteen years old. Tossed my life like dice!
In this vast place—wilderness—pine trees repeated to infinity, steep slopes of the Adirondacks like a brain jammed full to bursting.
The Nautauga State Forest Preserve is three hundred thousand acres of mountainous, boulder-strewn and densely wooded wilderness bounded at its northern edge by the St. Lawrence River and the Canadian border and at its southern edge by the Nautauga River, Beechum County. It was believed that I was “lost” here—wandering on foot—confused, or injured—or more likely, my body had been “dumped.” Much of the Preserve is remote, uninhabitable and unreachable except by the most intrepid hikers and mountain climbers. For most of three days in midsummer heat rescue workers and volunteers were searching in ever-widening concentric circles spiraling out from the dead end of an unpaved road that followed the northern bank of the Nautauga River three miles north of Wolf’s Head Lake, in the southern part of the Preserve. This was an area approximately eleven miles from my parents’ house in Carthage, New York.
This was an area contiguous with Wolf’s Head Lake where at one of the old lakeside inns I’d been last seen by “witnesses” at midnight of the previous night in the company of the suspected agent of my vanishing.
It was very hot. Insect-swarming heat following torrential rains in late June. Searchers were plagued by mosquitoes, biting flies, gnats. The most persistent were the gnats. That special panic of gnats in your eyelashes, gnats in your eyes, gnats in your mouth. That panic of having to breathe inside a swarm of gnats.
Yet, you can’t cease breathing. If you try, your lungs will breathe for you. Despite you.
Among experienced rescue workers there was qualified expectation of finding the missing girl alive after the first full day of the search, when rescue dogs had failed to pick up the girl’s scent. Law enforcement officers had even less expectation. But the younger park rangers and those volunteer searchers who knew the Mayfields were determined to find her alive. For the Mayfields were a well-known family in Carthage. For Zeno Mayfield was a man with a public reputation in Carthage and many of his friends, acquaintances and associates turned out to search for his missing daughter scarcely known to most of them by name.
None of the searchers making their way through the underbrush of the Preserve, into ravines and gullies, scrambling up rocky hillsides and climbing, at times crawling across the mottled faces of enormous boulders brushing gnats from their faces, wanted to think that in the Adirondack heat which registered in the upper 90s Fahrenheit after sunset a girl’s lifeless body, possibly an unclothed body on or in the ground, sticky with blood,
would begin to decompose quickly after death.
None of the searchers would have wished to utter the crude thought (second nature to seasoned rescue workers) that they might smell the girl before they discovered her.
Such a remark would be uttered grimly. Out of earshot of the frantic Zeno Mayfield.
Shouting himself hoarse, sweat-soaked and exhausted—“Cressida! Honey! Can you hear me? Where are you?”
He’d been a hiker, once. He’d been a man who’d needed to get away into the solitude of the mountains that had seemed to him once a place of refuge, consolation. But not for a long time now. And not now.
In this hot humid insect-breeding midsummer of 2005 in which Zeno Mayfield’s younger daughter vanished into the Nautauga State Forest Preserve with the seeming ease of a snake writhing out of its desiccated and torn outer skin.
T
HAT GIRL THAT GOT
lost in the Nautauga Preserve.
Or
, that girl that was killed somehow, and her body hid.
Where Zeno Mayfield’s daughter had disappeared to, and whether there was much likelihood of her being found alive, or in any reasonable state between alive and dead, was a question to confound everyone in Beechum County.
Everyone who knew the Mayfields, or even knew of them.
And for those who knew the Kincaid boy—the
war hero—
the question was yet more confounding.
Already by late morning of Sunday, July 10, news of the quickly organized search for
the missing girl
had been released into the rippling media-sea—“breaking news” on local Carthage radio and TV news programs, shortly then state-wide and AP syndicated news.
Dozens of rescue workers, professional and volunteer, are searching for 19-year-old Cressida Mayfield of Carthage, N.Y., believed to be missing in the Nautauga State Forest Preserve since the previous night July 9.
Corporal Brett Kincaid, 26, also of Carthage, identified by witnesses as having been in the company of the missing girl on the night of July 9, has been taken into custody by the Beechum County Sheriff’s Department for questioning.
No arrest has been made. No official statement regarding Corporal Kincaid has been released by the Sheriff’s Department.
Anyone with information regarding the whereabouts of Cressida Mayfield please contact . . .
HE KNEW:
she was alive.
He knew: if he persevered, if he did not despair, he would find her.
She was his younger child. She was the difficult child. She was the one to break his heart.
There was a reason for that, he supposed.
If she hated him. If she’d let herself be hurt, to hurt
him.
BUT HE HAD
no doubt, she was alive.
“I would know. I would feel it. If my daughter was gone from this earth—there would be an emptiness, unmistakably. I would feel it.”
HE HATED THAT
she was identified as
missing.
He’d insisted that she was
lost.
That is,
probably lost.
She’d wandered off, or run off. Somehow, she’d
gotten lost
in the Nautauga Preserve. The young man she’d been with—(this, the father didn’t understand: for the daughter had told her parents that she was going to spend the evening with other friends)—had insisted he didn’t know where she was, she’d left
him
.
In the front seat of the young man’s Jeep Wrangler there were said to be bloodstains. A smear of blood on the inside of the windshield on the passenger’s side, as if a bleeding face, or head, had been struck against it with some force.
Stray hairs, and a single clump of hair, dark in color as the hair of the
missing girl,
had been collected from the passenger’s seat and from the young man’s shirt.
Outside the vehicle there were no footprints—the shoulder of Sandhill Road was grassy, and then rocky, declining steeply to the fast-rushing Nautauga River.
The father didn’t (yet) know details. He knew that the young corporal had been taken into police custody having been found in a semiconscious alcoholic state inside his vehicle, haphazardly parked on a narrow unpaved road just inside the Nautauga Preserve, at about 8
A.M.
of Sunday, July 10, 2005.
Allegedly, the young corporal, Brett Kincaid, was the last person to have seen Cressida Mayfield before her “disappearance.”
Kincaid was a friend of the Mayfield family, or had been. Until the previous week he’d been engaged to the
missing girl
’s older sister.
The father had tried to see him: just to speak to him!
To look the young corporal in the eye. To see how the young corporal looked at
him.
The father had been refused. For the time being.
The young corporal was
in custody.
As news reports took care to note
No arrests have yet been made.
How disorienting all this was!—the father who’d long prided himself on being smart, shrewd, just a little quicker and a little more informed than anyone else was likely to be in his vicinity, could not comprehend what seemed to be set out before him like cards dealt by a sinister dealer.
His life—his life of routine complex as the workings of an expensive watch, yet unfailingly in his control—had been so abruptly altered. Not just the surprise—the shock—of his daughter’s “disappearance” but the circumstances of the “disappearance.”
It was not possible that Cressida had lied to him and to her mother—and yet, obviously, it seemed that Cressida had lied.
At any rate, she’d told them less than the truth about where she’d planned to go the previous night.
How out of character this was! Cressida had always scorned lying as moral weakness. It was cowardice to care so much of others’ opinions, one would stoop to
lie
.
And that she’d met up with her sister’s ex-fiancé, at a lakeside inn—that was even more astonishing.
The Mayfields had to tell police officers—they’d had to tell them all that they knew. It wasn’t police procedure to search for an adult who has been missing for such a relatively short period of time unless “foul play” is suspected.
The father had to insist that he was concerned that his daughter was “lost” in the Nautauga Preserve even as he couldn’t bring himself to acknowledge the possibility that she’d been “hurt.”
Or, if “hurt”—“seriously hurt.”
Not wanting to think
sexually abused, raped.
Not wanting to think
And worse . . .
Cressida was nineteen but a very young nineteen. Small-boned, childlike in her demeanor, with the body of a young boy—lithe, narrow-hipped, flat-chested. The father had seen men—(not boys: men)—staring at Cressida, especially in summer when she wore baggy T-shirts, jeans or cutoffs, her striking face pale without makeup; staring at Cressida in a kind of baffled yearning as if trying to determine if she was a young girl or a young boy; and why, though they stared so avidly at her, she remained oblivious of
them
.
So far as her parents knew, Cressida was inexperienced with boys or men.
She had the puritan ferocity of one who scorns not so much sexual experience as any sort of shared and intimate physical experience.
As her sister Juliet had said
Oh I am sure that Cressida has never been—you know—with anyone . . . I mean . . . I’m sure that she’s a . . .
Too sensitive of her sister’s feelings to say
virgin.
THE FATHER WAS
VERY EXCITED.
Adrenaline ran in his veins, his heart beat with an unnatural urgency. Telling himself
This is the excitement of the search. Knowing that Cressida is near.
He felt this, his daughter’s nearness. This man who never listened with any sort of sympathy to talk of such “mystical crap” as extrasensory perception had a conviction now, tramping through the Nautauga Preserve, that he could sense his daughter somewhere nearby. He could sense her thinking of
him.
Even as with a part of his mind he understood that, if she’d been anywhere near the entrance to the Preserve, anywhere near Sandhill Road and Sandhill Point, someone would have found her by now.
For he was trained in the law, and he had by nature the lawyer’s temperament—doubt, questioning, more questioning.
For he was trained to respond
Yes, but—?
The father thought how ironic, the daughter had never liked camping or hiking. Wilderness was boring to her, she’d said.
Meaning wilderness frightened her. Wilderness did not care for
her.
He’d known other people like that, and all of them, perhaps by chance, women. The female is most secure in a confined space, a clearly designated space in which one’s identity is mirrored in others’ eyes: in such a place, one cannot become easily
lost.
The rapacity of nature, Zeno thought. You never think of it when you’re in control. And when you’re no longer in control, it’s too late.
The father glanced upward, anxiously. High overhead, just visible through the dense pine boughs, a hawk—two hawks—red-shouldered hawks hunting together in long swooping arcs.
Vivid against the sky then suddenly plummeting, gone.
He’d seen owls swoop to the kill. An owl is a feathery killing machine and silent at such times when the only outcry is the cry of the prey.
Underfoot as he pushed through briars were scuttling things—rabbits, pack rats—a family of skunks—snakes. From somewhere close by the liquidy-gobbling cries of wild turkeys.
Wilderness too vast for the girl, the younger daughter. Zeno had not liked that in her: giving up too easily. Claiming she was bored, wanted to go home to her books and “art.”
Needing to squeeze all that she could into her brain. And you can’t squeeze three hundred thousand acres into a brain.
Cressida don’t do this to us! If you are somewhere close by let us know.
The father had grown hoarse calling the daughter’s name. It was a foolish waste of energy, he knew—none of the other volunteer searchers was calling the girl’s name.
From remarks made to him, and within his hearing, the father gathered that other, younger searchers were impressed with him, so far: a man of his age, much older than they, apparently an experienced hiker, in reasonably good physical condition.
At the start of the search this seemed so, at least.
“Mr. Mayfield? Here.”
He’d drunk his water too quickly. Breathing through his mouth which isn’t recommended for a serious hiker.
“Thanks, I’m OK. You’ll need it for yourself.”
“Mr. Mayfield, take it. I’ve got another bottle.”
The young man, sleek-muscled, lean, like a greyhound or a whippet—one of the Beechum County deputies, in T-shirt, shorts, hiking boots. The father wondered if the deputy was someone who knew his daughter—either of his daughters. He wondered if the deputy knew more about what might have happened to Cressida than he, the father, had yet been allowed to know.
The father was the kind of man more comfortable overseeing others, pressing favors upon others, than accepting favors himself. The father was a man who prided himself on being
strong, protective.
Still, it isn’t a good idea to become dehydrated. Light-headed. Random rushes of adrenaline leave you depleted, exhausted.
He took the water bottle. He drank.
Initially this morning they’d searched along the banks of the Nautauga River in the area in which the young corporal’s Jeep Wrangler had been parked. This was a stretch of river where fishermen came often, both marshy and rock-strewn; there were numerous footprints amid the rocks, overlaid upon one another, filled with water since a recent rain. Rescue dogs leapt forward barking excitedly having been given articles of the girl’s clothing to smell but soon lost the trail, if there was a trail, whimpered and drifted about clueless. Miles along the river curving and twisting through the rock-strewn land and then they’d decided to alter their strategy fanning out in more or less concentric circles from the Point. Some had searched for lost hikers and children previously in the Preserve and had their particular way of searching but Beechum County law enforcement strategy was to keep close together, only a few yards apart, though it was difficult where there was underbrush and masses of trees, yet the point was not to overlook what might have fallen to the ground, torn clothing in briars, scraped against a tree, any sign that the lost girl had passed this way, a crucial sign that might save her life.
The father listened to what was told to him, explained to him, with an air of calm. In any public gathering Zeno Mayfield presented himself as the most reasonable of men: a man you could trust.
He’d had a career as a man who addressed others, with unfailing intelligence, enthusiasm. But now, there was no opportunity for him to give orders to others. He felt a clutch of helplessness, in the Preserve. Tramping on foot, dependent upon his physical strength, not his more customary cunning.
But O God if his daughter was hurt. If his daughter had been hurt.
Not wanting to think if she’d fallen somewhere, if she’d broken a leg, if she lay unconscious, unable to hear them calling her, unable to respond. Trying not to think if she was nowhere within earshot, borne away in the fast-flowing river that was elevated after heavy rainstorms the previous week, thirty miles downstream to the west where the Nautauga River emptied into Lake Ontario.
Through the morning there were false alarms, false sightings. A female camper wearing a red shirt, staring at them as they approached her campsite. And her partner, another young woman, emerging from a tent, for a moment frightened, hostile.
Excuse us have you seen?
. . . girl of nineteen, looks younger. We think she is somewhere in the vicinity . . .
IN THE SEVENTH
HOUR
of the first-day’s search, early Sunday afternoon the father sighted his daughter ahead, less than one hundred yards away.
Jolted awake, shouting—“Cressida!”
A desperate run, a heedless run, down a steep incline as other searchers stopped in their tracks to stare.
Several saw what the father was seeing: on the farther bank of a narrow mountain stream where the girl had fallen or lain down exhausted to sleep.
Rivulets of sweat ran into the father’s eyes burning like acid. He was running clumsily downhill, sharp pains between his shoulder blades and in his legs. A great ungainly beast on its hind legs, staggering.
“Cressida!”
The daughter lay motionless on the farther side of the stream, part-hidden by underbrush. One of her limbs—a leg, or an arm—lay trailing into the stream. The father was shouting hoarsely—“Cressida!” He could not believe that his daughter was injured or broken but only just sleeping, waiting for him.